Browning's England Part 45

When, through his journey, was the fool at ease?

I'm at ease now, friend; worldly in this world, I take and like its way of life; I think My brothers, who administer the means, Live better for my comfort--that's good too; And G.o.d, if he p.r.o.nounce upon such life, Approves my service, which is better still.

If he keep silence,--why, for you or me Or that brute beast pulled-up in to-day's "Times,"

What odds is't, save to ourselves, what life we lead?

Turning to the life of Cardinal Wiseman, it is of especial interest in connection with Browning's portrayal of him to observe his earlier years. He was born in Spain, having a Spanish father of English descent and an English mother, all Catholics, as Blougram says, "There's one great form of Christian faith I happened to be born in." His mother took him as an infant, and laid him upon the altar of the Cathedral of Seville, and consecrated him to the service of the Church.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Cardinal Wiseman]

His father having died when he was a tiny boy, his mother took him and his brother to England where he was trained at the Catholic college of Ushaw. From there he went to Rome to study at the English Catholic College there. Later he became Rector of this College. The sketch of Wiseman at this period given by his biographer, Wilfred Ward, is most attractive. "Scattered through his 'Recollections' are interesting impressions left by his student life. While mastering the regular course of scholastic philosophy and theology sufficiently to take his degree with credit, his tastes were not primarily in this direction. The study of Roman antiquities, Christian and Pagan, was congenial to him, as was also the study of Italian art--in which he ultimately became proficient--and of music: and he early devoted himself to the Syriac and Arabic languages. In all these pursuits the enthusiasm and eminence of men living in Rome itself at this era of renaissance was a potent stimulus to work. The hours he set aside for reading were many more than the rule demanded. But the daily walk and the occasional expedition to places of historic interest outside of Rome helped also to store his mind and to fire his imagination." Wiseman writes, himself, of this period, "The life of the student in Rome should be one of unblended enjoyment. His very relaxations become at once subsidiary to his work and yet most delightfully recreative. His daily walks may be through the field of art ... his wanderings along the stream of time ... a thousand memories, a thousand a.s.sociations accompany him." From this letter and from accounts of him he would seem to have been possessed of a highly imaginative temperament, possibly more artistic than religious.

Scholars, linguists, or historians, artists or antiquarians interested him far more than thinkers or theologians. In noting the effects on Wiseman's character of the thoughts and sights of Rome, "it must be observed," writes Ward, "that even the action of directly religious influences brought out his excessive impressionableness. His own inner life was as vivid a pageant to him as the history of the Church. He was liable at this time to the periods of spiritual exaltation--matched, as we shall see later on, by fits of intense despondency--which marked him through life."

This remarkable intellectual activity brought with it doubts of religious truth. "The imaginative delight in Rome as a living witness to the faith entirely left him, and at the same time he was attacked by mental disturbances and doubts of the truth of Christianity. There are contemporary indications, and still plainer accounts in the letters of his later life, of acute suffering from these trials. The study of Biblical criticism, even in the early stages it had then reached, seems immediately to have occasioned them; and the suffering they caused him was aggravated into intense and almost alarming depression by the feebleness of his bodily health." He says, speaking of this phase in his life, "Many and many an hour have I pa.s.sed, alone, in bitter tears, on the _loggia_ of the English College, when every one was reposing in the afternoon, and I was fighting with subtle thoughts and venomous suggestions of a fiendlike infidelity which I durst not confide to any one, for there was no one that could have sympathized with me. This lasted for years; but it made me study and think, to conquer the plague--for I can hardly call it danger--both for myself and for others.

But during the actual struggle the simple submission of faith is the only remedy. Thoughts against faith must be treated at the time like temptations against any other virtue--put away; though in cooler moments they may be safely a.n.a.lyzed and unraveled." Again he wrote of these years as, "Years of solitude, of desolation, years of shattered nerves, dread often of instant insanity, consumptive weakness, of sleepless nights and weary days, and hours of tears which no one witnessed."

"Of the effect of these years of desolation on his character he speaks as being simply invaluable. It completed what Ushaw had begun, the training in patience, self-reliance, and concentration in spite of mental depression. It was amid these trials, he adds, 'that I wrote my "Horae Syriacae" and collected my notes for the lectures on the "Connection between Science and Revealed Religion" and the "Eucharist."

Without this training I should not have thrown myself into the Puseyite controversy at a later period.' Any usefulness which discovered itself in later years he considers the 'result of self-discipline' during his inner conflict. The struggle so absorbed his energies that his early life was pa.s.sed almost wholly free from the special trials to which that period is liable. He speaks of his youth as in that respect 'almost temptationless.'" This state of mind seemed to last about five years and then he writes in a letter:

"I have felt myself for some months gradually pa.s.sing into a new state of mind and heart which I can hardly describe, but which I trust is the last stage of mental progress, in which I hope I may much improve, but out of which I trust I may never pa.s.s. I could hardly express the calm mild frame of mind in which I have lived; company and society I have almost entirely shunned, or have moved through it as a stranger; hardly a disturbing thought, hardly a grating sensation has crossed my being, of which a great feeling of love seems to have been the principle.

Whither, I am inclined to ask myself, does all this tend? Whence does it proceed? I think I could make an interesting history of my mind's religious progress, if I may use a word shockingly perverted by modern fanatics, from the hard dry struggles I used to have when first I commenced to study on my own account, to the settling down into a state of stern conviction, and so after some years to the n.o.bler and more soothing evidences furnished by the grand harmonies and beautiful features of religion, whether considered in contact with lower objects or viewed in her own crystal mirror. I find it curious, too, and interesting to trace the workings of those varied feelings upon my relations to the outward world. I remember how for years I lost all relish for the glorious ceremonies of the Church. I heeded not its venerable monuments and sacred records scattered over the city; or I studied them all with the dry eye of an antiquarian, looking in them for proofs, not for sensations, being ever actively alive to the collection of evidences and demonstrations of religious truth. But now that the time of my probation as I hope it was, is past, I feel as though the freshness of childhood's thoughts had once more returned to me, my heart expands with renewed delight and delicious feelings every time I see the holy objects and practices around me, and I might almost say that I am leading a life of spiritual epicureanism, opening all my senses to a rich draught of religious sensations."

From these glimpses it would appear that Wiseman was a much more sincere man in his religious feeling than he is given credit for by Browning.

His belief is with him not a matter of cold, hard calculation as to the att.i.tude which will be, so to speak, the most politic from both a worldly and a spiritual point of view. The beautiful pa.s.sage beginning "Just when we are safest, there's a sunset touch" etc., comes nearer to the genuine enthusiasm of a Wiseman than any other in the poem. There is an essential difference between the minds of the poet and the man he portrays, which perhaps made it impossible for Browning fully to interpret Wiseman's att.i.tude. Both have religious fervor, but Browning's is born of a consciousness of G.o.d revealed directly to himself, while Wiseman's consciousness of G.o.d comes to him primarily through the authority of the Church, that is through generations of authoritative believers the first of whom experienced the actuality of Revelation.

Hundreds and thousands of people have minds of this caliber. They cannot see a truth direct for themselves, they must be told by some person clothed in authority that this or that is true or false. To Wiseman the beauty of his own form of religion with its special dogmas made so strong an appeal, that, since he could only believe through authority, under any circ.u.mstances, it was natural to him to adopt the particular form that gave him the most satisfaction. Proofs detrimental to belief do not worry long with doubts such a mind, because the authority they depend on is not the authority of knowledge, but the authority of belief. This comes out clearly enough in one of Wiseman's letters in which after enumerating a number of proofs brought forward by various scholars tending to cast discredit on the dogmas of the Church, he triumphantly exclaims, "And yet, who that has an understanding to judge, is driven for a moment from the holdings of faith by such comparisons as these!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sacred Heart _F. Utenbach_]

Upon looking through his writings there will always be found in his expression of belief, I think, that ring of true sincerity as well as what I should call an intense artistic delight in the essential beauty of his religion.

As to Blougram's argument that he believed in living in the world while he was in it, Wiseman's life was certainly not that of a worldling alone, though he is described by one person as being "a genuine priest, very good looking and able bodied, and with much apparent practice in the world." He was far too much of a student and worker to be altogether so worldly-minded as Browning represents him.

His chief interest for Englishmen is his connection with the Tractarian Movement. The wish of his soul was to aid the Catholic Revival in England, and with that end in view he visited England in 1835. Two years before, the movement at Oxford, known as the Tractarian Movement had begun. The opinions of the men in this movement were, as every one knows, printed in a series of ninety tracts of which Newman wrote twenty-four. It was an outgrowth of the conditions of the time. To sum up in the words of Withrow,[3] "The Church of England had distinctly lost ground as a directing and controlling force in the nation. The most thoughtful and earnest minds in the Church felt the need of a great religious awakening and an aggressive movement to regain its lost influence." As Dean Church describes them, the two characteristic forms of Christianity in the Church of England were the High Church, and the Evangelicals, or Low Church." Of the former he says: "Its better members were highly cultivated, benevolent men, intolerant of irregularities both of doctrine and life, whose lives were governed by an unostentatious but solid and unfaltering piety, ready to burst forth on occasion into fervid devotion. Its worse members were jobbers and hunters after preferment, pluralists who built fortunes and endowed families out of the Church, or country gentlemen in orders, who rode to hounds and shot and danced and farmed, and often did worse things."

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Religious Progress of the Century.

But at Oxford was a group of men of intense moral earnestness including Newman, Pusey, Keble, Arnold, Maurice, Kingsley, and others, who began an active propaganda of the new or revised doctrines of the Oxford Movement.

"The success of the Tracts," says Molesworth, "was much greater, and the outcry against them far louder and fiercer, than their authors had expected. The Tracts were at first small and simple, but became large and learned theological treatises. Changes, too, came over the views of some of the writers. Doctrines which probably would have shocked them at first were put forward with a recklessness which success had increased.

Alarm was excited, remonstrances stronger and stronger were addressed to them. They were attacked as Romanizing in their tendency."

"The effect of such writing was two-fold[4]--the public were dismayed and certain members of the Tractarian party avowed their intention of becoming Romanists. So decided was the setting of the tide towards Rome that Newman made a vigorous effort to turn it by his famous Tract No.

90. In this he endeavored to show that it was possible to interpret the Thirty-nine Articles in the interest of Roman Catholicism. This tract aroused a storm of indignation. The violent controversy which it occasioned led to the discontinuance of the series."

FOOTNOTES:

[4] See Withrow.

Such in little was this remarkable movement. When Tract No. 90 appeared Wiseman had been in England for some time, and had been a strong influence in taking many thinking men in the direction of Rome. His lectures and discourses upon his first visit to England had attracted remarkable attention. The account runs by one who attended his lectures to Catholics and Protestants: "Society in this country was impressed, and listened almost against its will, and listened not displeased. Here was a young Roman priest, fresh from the center of Catholicism, who showed himself master, not only of the intricacies of polemical discussion but of the amenities of civilized life. The s.p.a.cious church of Moorfields was thronged on every evening of Dr. Wiseman's appearance.

Many persons of position and education were converted, and all departed with abated prejudice, and with very different notions about Catholicism from those with which they had been prepossessed by their education."

Wiseman, himself, wrote, "I had the consolation of witnessing the patient and edifying attention of a crowded audience, many of whom stood for two hours without any symptom of impatience."

The great triumph for Wiseman, however, was when, shortly after Tract 90, Newman, "a man," described "in many ways, the most remarkable that England has seen during the century, perhaps the most remarkable whom the English Church has produced in any century," went over to the Church of Rome and was confirmed by Wiseman. Others followed his example and by 1853 as many as four hundred clergymen and laity had become Roman Catholics.

The controversies and discussions of that time, it must be remembered, were more upon the dogmas of the church than upon what we should call to-day the essential truths of religion. Yet, to a certain order of mind dogmas seem important truths. There are those whose religious att.i.tude cannot be preserved without belief in dogmas, and the advantage of the Catholic Church is that it holds firmly to its dogmas, come what may. It was expected, however, that this Romeward Movement would arouse intense antipathy. "The arguments by which it was justified were considered, in many cases, disingenuous, if not Jesuitical."

In opposition of this sort we come nearer to Browning's att.i.tude of mind. Because such arguments as Wiseman and the Tractarians used could not convince him, he takes the ordinary ground of the opposition, that in using such arguments they must be insincere, and they must be perfectly conscious of their insincerity. Still, in spite of the fact that Browning's mind could not get inside of Blougram's, he shows that he has some sympathy for the Bishop in the close of the poem where he says, "He said true things but called them by wrong names." Raise Blougram's philosophy to the plane of the mysticism of a Browning, and the arguments for belief would be much the same but the _counters_ in the arguments would become symbols instead of dogmas.

In "Christmas-Eve and Easter Day," Browning becomes the true critic of the nineteenth-century religious movements. He pa.s.ses in review in a series of dramatic pictures the three most diverse modes of religious thought of the century. The dissenter's view is symbolized by a scene in a very humble chapel in England, the Catholic view by a vision of high ma.s.s at St. Peter's and the Agnostic view by a vision of a lecture by a learned German professor,--while the view of the modern mystic who remains religious in the face of all destructive criticism is shown in the speaker of the poem. The intuitional, aspiring side of his nature is symbolized by the vision of Christ that appears to him, while the intensity of its power fluctuates as he either holds fast or lets go the garment of Christ. Opposed to his intuitional side is his reasoning side.

Possibly the picture of the dissenting chapel is exaggeratedly humble, though if we suppose it to be a Methodist Chapel, it may be true to life, as Methodism was the form of religion which made its appeal to the lowest cla.s.ses. Indeed, at the time of its first successes, it was the saving grace of England. "But for the moral antiseptic," writes Withrow, "furnished by Methodism, and the revival of religion in all the churches which it produced, the history of England would have been far other than it was. It would probably have been swept into the maelstrom of revolution and shared the political and religious convulsions of the neighboring nation," that is the French Revolution.

"But Methodism had greatly changed the condition of the people. It had rescued vast mult.i.tudes from ignorance and barbarism, and raised them from almost the degradation of beasts to the condition of men and the fellowship of saints. The habits of thrift and industry which it fostered led to the acc.u.mulation, if not of wealth, at least to that of a substantial competence; and built up that safeguard of the Commonwealth, a great, intelligent, industrious, religious Middle-Cla.s.s in the community."

After the death of Wesley came various divisions in the Methodist Church; it has so flexible a system that it may be adapted to very varied needs of humanity, and in that has consisted its great power.

The mission of the church was originally to the poor and lowly, but "It has won for itself in spite of scorn and persecution," says Dr. Scholl, "a place of power in the State and church of Great Britain."

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Nativity _Fra Lippo Lippi_]

A scornful att.i.tude is vividly brought before us in the opening of this poem, to be succeeded later by a more charitable point of view.

CHRISTMAS-EVE

I

Out of the little chapel I burst Into the fresh night-air again.

Five minutes full, I waited first In the doorway, to escape the rain That drove in gusts down the common's centre At the edge of which the chapel stands, Before I plucked up heart to enter.

Heaven knows how many sorts of hands Reached past me, groping for the latch Of the inner door that hung on catch More obstinate the more they fumbled, Till, giving way at last with a scold Of the crazy hinge, in squeezed or tumbled One sheep more to the rest in fold, And left me irresolute, standing sentry In the sheepfold's lath-and-plaster entry, Six feet long by three feet wide, Part.i.tioned off from the vast inside-- I blocked up half of it at least.

No remedy; the rain kept driving.

They eyed me much as some wild beast, That congregation, still arriving, Some of them by the main road, white A long way past me into the night, Skirting the common, then diverging; Not a few suddenly emerging From the common's self thro' the paling-gaps, --They house in the gravel-pits perhaps, Where the road stops short with its safeguard border Of lamps, as tired of such disorder;-- But the most turned in yet more abruptly From a certain squalid knot of alleys, Where the town's bad blood once slept corruptly, Which now the little chapel rallies And leads into day again,--its priestliness Lending itself to hide their beastliness So cleverly (thanks in part to the mason), And putting so cheery a whitewashed face on Those neophytes too much in lack of it, That, where you cross the common as I did, And meet the party thus presided, "Mount Zion" with Love-lane at the back of it, They front you as little disconcerted As, bound for the hills, her fate averted, And her wicked people made to mind him, Lot might have marched with Gomorrah behind him.

II

Well, from the road, the lanes or the common In came the flock: the fat weary woman, Panting and bewildered, down-clapping Her umbrella with a mighty report, Grounded it by me, wry and flapping, A wreck of whalebones; then, with a snort, Like a startled horse, at the interloper (Who humbly knew himself improper, But could not shrink up small enough) --Round to the door, and in,--the gruff Hinge's invariable scold Making my very blood run cold.

Prompt in the wake of her, up-pattered On broken clogs, the many-tattered Little old-faced peaking sister-turned-mother Of the sickly babe she tried to smother Somehow up, with its spotted face, From the cold, on her breast, the one warm place; She too must stop, wring the poor ends dry Of a draggled shawl, and add thereby Her tribute to the door-mat, sopping Already from my own clothes' dropping, Which yet she seemed to grudge I should stand on: Then, stooping down to take off her pattens, She bore them defiantly, in each hand one, Planted together before her breast And its babe, as good as a lance in rest.

Close on her heels, the dingy satins Of a female something, past me flitted, With lips as much too white, as a streak Lay far too red on each hollow cheek; And it seemed the very door-hinge pitied All that was left of a woman once, Holding at least its tongue for the nonce.

Then a tall yellow man, like the _Penitent Thief_, With his jaw bound up in a handkerchief, And eyelids screwed together tight, Led himself in by some inner light.

And, except from him, from each that entered, I got the same interrogation-- "What, you the alien, you have ventured To take with us, the elect, your station?

A carer for none of it, a _Gallio_!"-- Thus, plain as print, I read the glance At a common prey, in each countenance As of huntsman giving his hounds the tallyho.

And, when the door's cry drowned their wonder, The draught, it always sent in shutting, Made the flame of the single tallow candle In the cracked square lantern I stood under, Shoot its blue lip at me, reb.u.t.ting As it were, the luckless cause of scandal: I verily fancied the zealous light (In the chapel's secret, too!) for spite Would shudder itself clean off the wick, With the airs of a Saint John's Candlestick.

There was no standing it much longer.

"Good folks," thought I, as resolve grew stronger, "This way you perform the Grand-Inquisitor When the weather sends you a chance visitor?

You are the men, and wisdom shall die with you, And none of the old Seven Churches vie with you!

But still, despite the pretty perfection To which you carry your trick of exclusiveness, And, taking G.o.d's word under wise protection, Correct its tendency to diffusiveness, And bid one reach it over hot plough-shares,-- Still, as I say, though you've found salvation, If should choose to cry, as now, 'Shares!'-- See if the best of you bars me my ration!

I prefer, if you please, for my expounder Of the laws of the feast, the feast's own Founder; Mine's the same right with your poorest and sickliest Supposing I don the marriage vestiment: So, shut your mouth and open your Testament, And carve me my portion at your quickliest!"

Accordingly, as a shoemaker's lad With wizened face in want of soap, And wet ap.r.o.n wound round his waist like a rope, (After stopping outside, for his cough was bad, To get the fit over, poor gentle creature, And so avoid disturbing the preacher) --Pa.s.sed in, I sent my elbow spikewise At the shutting door, and entered likewise, Received the hinge's accustomed greeting, And crossed the threshold's magic pentacle, And found myself in full conventicle, --To wit, in Zion Chapel Meeting, On the Christmas-Eve of 'Forty-nine, Which, calling its flock to their special clover, Found all a.s.sembled and one sheep over, Whose lot, as the weather pleased, was mine.

III